During development of the 3rd Generation (3G) Mobile Communication technology or the 4th Generation (4G) Mobile Communication technology, an operator proposes small cell deployment for a dramatic increase of mobile data service traffic. A user can enjoy a high-rate data service in a small cell, especially in an indoor or outdoor hotspot scenario.
A low power node (LPN) is used for small cell deployment. Transmit power of the low power node is lower than that of a macro base station, and there may be multiple low power nodes. A link between the LPN and user equipment (UE) is referred to as an access link, and a link between the LPN and a base station is referred to as a backhaul link. The backhaul link may be a wireless backhaul or a wired backhaul. Backhaul links of multiple LPNs share uplink/downlink resources of a base station. The uplink/downlink resource may be an uplink/downlink spectrum resource (that is, an air interface resource) of the base station, or may be an uplink/downlink physical transmission resource (that is, a wired transmission resource such as a fiber or an asymmetric digital subscriber line (DSL)) between the LPN and the base station.
However, shortening of a coverage radius of a small cell is accompanied with a decrease of users in coverage of the small cell. When user equipment moves and/or a service class ratio changes, a service of the small cell fluctuates obviously. Consequently, there is also an obvious change in a backhaul link capacity requirement imposed by a network on the small cell. When a user in the coverage of the small cell uses a large-traffic service, a backhaul link capacity required for the large-traffic service is larger than a backhaul capacity required for a low bandwidth consuming service. Therefore, multiple backhaul links of an LPN cause capacity impact on uplink/downlink resources shared by the multiple backhaul links. Consequently, backhaul load on the uplink/downlink resources increases, and data transmission reliability is affected.